MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator Message Board

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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator

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To: stocks1234 who wrote ()	6/4/1996 12:59:00 AM
From: Bill Fischofer	of 24154

The key is the OEM Market Being in the web business I work with "real users" every day. I can tell you most folks outside this and other "digerati" circles find the net a bewildering place and neither know nor care about the finer points of the technical leapfrogging that goes on in this industry. They'll use what comes with their machine. On this basis alone NSCP faces a herculean challenge. MSFT owns the OEM software market and you can bet that this channel will carry IE by the hundreds of millions of copies over the next few years. Compared to this tidal wave, today's total install base of all browsers looks pretty small. Unless NSCP gets some OEM agreements in place they'll be buried. Retail sales just won't cut it. The same for the server side of the business. Every copy of NT 4.0 Server ships with IIS preloaded. This is a huge advantage since even in the corporate world the temptation to run things "out of the box" is very real. For those who do shop around, NSCP has real competition in Apache, which offers many technical attractions, as well as an unbeatable price. For a recent discussion of this see sun.com which notes that Apache is the "most popular and fastest-growing server in use on the Web.". How many readers here knew that statistic? As far as standards go, MSFT's strategy is clearly to have IE match Navigator feature-for-feature until the sheer number of IE installs (thanks to OEM bundling) force NSCP to start copying IE features in Navigator. At that point the game will be over. IE 3.0 shows this strategy in action. Even in its Beta 1 release I find I now use it in preference to Navigator 2.0 whereas before I always turned to Navigator in preference to IE 2.0. It matches the most important new features from Navigator 2.0 (Frames & Javascript) and is just better integrated into the Win95 operating environment. Full Java support is slated for Beta 2 later this month, and we're only starting to see the edges of the ActiveX integration (try opening the URL "C:" and you'll see what I mean). MSFT is sucking the browser into the OS while NSCP promises to add OS features to their browser. Ask yourself which will be the bigger job?

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